For Mary Simons and Joe Trapido,
and for Vina Pulseford. And in memory of
Ruth Picardie (1964–1997)
Contents
I Miss Delight and the Queen of the Night
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
II The Prince and the Highland Brain Surgeon
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
III The High Priest and the Demon Padrone
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
A Note on the Author
I
Miss Delight and the Queen of the Night
Chapter 1
Jem was a joyful mystery to Alice. She was something to give thanks for. She had first appeared in the classroom, not at the beginning of term like a normal person, but mid-term on a Wednesday. She had appeared, ‘like a dropped acorn’, halfway through the term, halfway through the week, halfway through the Silent Reading Hour. Suddenly there she was in the doorway, almost as tall as the doorway itself. She was wearing an old blazer which screamed its origins from the under-a-pound rail of the Outgrown Uniform Sale and on her feet she wore a pair of down-at-heel, grossly unpolished black pumps. She was carrying her things in a sort of boat-shaped canvas toolbag of considerable size.
‘I’m Jem McCrail,’ she said to Miss Aldridge, in a poised, clear voice which Miss Aldridge took as an affront. ‘Miss Trotter sent me.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Miss Aldridge. ‘The new gel. But I have you registered here as Veronica Bernadette McCrail.’
Jem appeared to ride this hitch with equanimity. ‘I’m Jem,’ she said.
Miss Aldridge looked at her from top to toe and lingered pointedly upon the unpolished pumps. ‘I have no objection to certain legitimate abbreviations of gels’ Christian names,’ she said, ‘but I fail to see how “Veronica Bernadette” can possibly shorten to Jem.’
‘I’m Jem after the “jem-sengwiches” in P. G. Wodehouse,’ Jem said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Miss Aldridge said.
‘You’ll find it’s in the Lord Emsworth stories,’ Jem said helpfully. ‘His lordship meets an urchin girl in the cowshed. You’re probably familiar with the story.’
‘Perhaps you had better sit down, Veronica Bernadette,’ Miss Aldridge said, with strong intent to undermine, but she had already determined in this case to start as she meant to go on. ‘Alice Pilling will take care of you – since her “better half” is still absenting herself.’
Alice reflected on Miss Aldridge’s idiom for a moment. She had never thought of herself and Flora as two halves of something before. Certainly not better and worse. And right then she really had every reason to avoid thinking about Flora. To think of her was too dreadful. It made her shudder. The new girl came and sat down in Flora’s place.
‘During this hour we read in complete silence,’ Miss Aldridge said, and she bore down upon the new girl with one of the books deemed sufficiently improving for the Silent Reading Hour. Alice observed that Jem had been handed the biography of Oliver Cromwell. She herself had had it until the previous week. ‘Complete silence,’ Miss Aldridge repeated. ‘Is that correct, Form Three?’
A half-dozen funereal voices concurred without enthusiasm. The school was not one which attracted bookish girls on the whole, and there was no one in the third form who appeared positively athirst for a greater understanding of the English Revolution – except perhaps Flora, who was absent. Alice’s schoolfellows generally contented themselves with winning all the inter-school hockey matches. Most of them left, after taking a gentle course or two in History of Art or Scripture, and went off to mark time in one or other of the preppier secretarial colleges around London. One or two of them made it to cram colleges in Oxford or Cambridge where the Champagne-and-Eights-Week experience was available to them without any of the undergraduate’s hard grind. Claire Crouchley’s older sister was currently attending a finishing school where she was learning how to emerge gracefully from a Rolls-Royce in a hat.
The fees paid by the girls’ parents at Alice’s school were a little higher than those at the local Catholic school or at the nearby Day School Trust, but Alice’s school boasted not only a boarding establishment and a neo-Georgian clock tower, but an oak-panelled dining hall with refectory tables and a solid air of tradition which had been invented in the 1930s. Once a year, on Founders’ Day, the headmistress awarded a monstrous silver shield the size of a firescreen to a girl for ‘Excellence in Needlework’, while those exhibiting excellence in Geography, Mathematics or Latin were presented with small plated goblets, rather like egg cups with joke-shop ears.
Jem, Alice noticed, had cast a jaundiced eye over the spine of the Cromwell biography. She waited for Miss Aldridge to proceed down the aisle before coolly extracting from the toolbag a battered paperback entitled The Leopard, by one Giuseppe di Lampedusa. This she placed deftly within the covers of the Cromwell biography and soon appeared lost in its pages.
‘Naturally,’ Miss Aldridge said, qualifying benevolently – and her eye lit at once upon Claire Crouchley – ‘if a gel has a genuine question with regard to her reading matter, then I am always available.’
It was seldom that a Silent Reading Hour went by, Alice had frequently noted, without Claire Crouchley coming forth with ‘a genuine question with regard to her reading matter’. Pretty, stupid and rich, Claire combined an earnest desire for currying-up with the most minimal conceptual grasp Alice had ever encountered. Still, she could swim extremely well which made her very popular in the summer months. Alice loathed the swimming pool. It shamed her that she was the only girl in the form who couldn’t do a decent front crawl. Thinking up excuses for avoiding the swimming pool was one of the things which brought on her stammer. And that in spite of all the expensive speech therapy sessions with dear Dr Neumann in Duke Street.
‘Please, Miss Aldridge,’ Claire said at once, ‘please Miss Aldridge, but what I don’t understand in my book is about after the Norman Conquest. I mean, what I want to know is – however did we get back to being English again?’
Miss Aldridge, in matters relating to national identity, was always wonderfully reassuring. ‘We were never really French,’ she said. ‘To be sure the kings and nobles who ruled us were French – for a few hundred years – but we soon turned them into good Englishmen.’
‘But hundreds of years?’ Claire said in disbelief, almost as though she, personally, had been required to spend the duration of the Norman Yoke conjugating irregular verbs and munching on snails in garlic butter.
‘Excuse me, Miss Aldridge,’ Jem said, and she looked up from the Lampedusa. ‘Would you say that during the Roman occupation we all became Italians?’
Miss Aldridge frowned with displeasure. She was close to retirement by then
and belonged to a generation of Englishwomen not over-keen on foreigners in general, though Alice thought she had once detected a certain romanticism in Miss Aldridge’s attitude towards Bedouin Arabs. Italians were definitely among her least favourite foreigners and tradition had it among some of the girls that she had once had her buttocks pinched while on a package holiday in Sorrento. Alice’s imagination had privately elaborated upon this myth, so that she believed Miss Aldridge to have resorted to her armour-plated corsetry as a precaution against a sudden airdrop of Italians on Surrey.
‘The Ancient Romans were not Italians, Veronica,’ Miss Aldridge said. ‘Dear me, no! They were a highly disciplined and very hygienic people.’
Behind Claire sat an unfortunate, boy-crazed girl called Lenora Gripe, who dreamed constantly of being an air hostess, but had somehow managed to look like a well-worn publican’s moll from the age of nine. Alice had always pitied Lenora, not only for her over-active sebaceous glands, but for the way in which Miss Aldridge treated her as though she were the class untouchable. Right then Lenora’s tongue was flicking insolently through a saliverous ribbon of chewing gum.
‘My Grandad was demobbed in Italy,’ she said. ‘He always used to say, “smell Naples and die”.’
‘That will do,’ said Miss Aldridge. ‘You will go to the cloakroom at once, Lenora, and remove whatever it is that you are eating.’ The class lapsed once more into dejected silence over its texts.
‘She surely doesn’t just dole out these appalling books?’ Jem whispered suddenly to Alice. ‘What I mean is, aren’t you ever allowed to choose?’
‘She doles them out,’ Alice whispered back. ‘And most of them are a lot worse than that one. Well, at least yours has got pictures.’
‘Pictures of a man with warts,’ Jem said. ‘What’s yours?’ Alice had been issued with a collection of gentlemen’s essays reprinted from the Strand Magazine. She was reading a contribution entitled ‘On Keeping a Diary’, in which the writer explained that he consumed his time going to places in order to collect things which he could then write down in his diary.
‘Going to places?’ Jem said eagerly. ‘What sort of places?’ Somewhat to Alice’s surprise, she then stretched her long legs expansively before her and tapped together the toes of the unpolished pumps. ‘ “Oh, for a beaker full of the warm South”!’ she said. ‘Personally, I’d like to “smell Naples and live”. Wouldn’t you?’
‘But he only means going to dinner parties,’ Alice said. ‘I mean dinner parties …’
Alice’s father was a successful local building contractor; a kindly self-made man from the north of England who had come south from a small brickyard in a spirit of enterprise. He had largesse to dispense and a pretty, get-ahead wife, Alice’s mother, who managed, even with running her own estate agency, to play gracious hostess to all the local pillars of trade. The result was that Alice had witnessed enough middle-aged conviviality around her parents’ dining table to have left her unexcited by such occasions. It had also made her a somewhat open-eyed expert on gum recession and tobacco stains.
‘Do your parents have dinner parties all the time?’ she said.
‘Oh, of course,’ Jem said at once. ‘All the time.’
‘New gel!’ Miss Aldridge said suddenly and Alice saw Jem jump a little. ‘What are you reading?’
In the Lampedusa, as Jem explained to Alice afterwards, Garibaldi had just landed in Sicily, which was very bad news for Fabrizio, Prince of Salina.
‘I’m reading about Gari – Cromwell,’ Jem said.
‘ “Gary” Cromwell?’ Miss Aldridge said, who was not above playing to the gallery at times. ‘ “Gary” Cromwell?’
‘I’m sorry, Miss Aldridge,’ Jem said, and she went on to display what Alice considered a quite marvellous talent for thinking on her feet. ‘I meant Oliver Gary Cromwell. Gary from his mother’s side, after Gareth, the ancient King of Cornwall.’
‘Indeed?’ said Miss Aldridge suspiciously, while not quite venturing to contradict. ‘Indeed? And would you kindly favour the class with what you have learned about the Lord Protector from your reading so far?’
‘Oh,’ Jem said, pausing for just a moment. ‘I – um – I’m afraid I like the Royalists better.’
‘And why so?’ said Miss Aldridge, who sounded affronted. She was a firm Cromwellite, for all that she kept a reproduction of the Annigoni portrait of Queen Elizabeth II hanging from the form-room wall.
‘Because I’m a Catholic, Miss Aldridge,’ Jem said. ‘And because the Royalists had nicer clothes.’ This last was somehow like a red rag to a firmly Protestant bull.
‘Nicer clothes?’ boomed Miss Aldridge indignantly. ‘Nicer clothes?’
‘Oh yes, Miss Aldridge,’ Jem said. ‘Much nicer clothes.’ She was exuding conviction, Alice thought. Jem’s eyes were shining just as though a row of Vandyke portraits had appeared before her, all shimmering with a richness of silks and fine array.
And then, before Miss Aldridge could retort, something happened. Something so wholly unlike anything which had ever happened before that the event bound itself up in Alice’s mind inextricably with Jem’s coming. It seemed to Alice, from that moment, that Jem possessed quite magical powers of intercession – though whether solely through her own charmed spirit or through the force of her religion, Alice could not know. A stoned black man stepped into the classroom through the open sash window and confronted Miss Aldridge with a dazzling smile.
‘Hey, man!’ he said, when Miss Aldridge was so obviously not a man, but an ageing spinster in a Gor-ray plaid skirt and Dr Scholl’s support stockings. ‘What you wearin’ dem fuckin’ robes for? You some sorta fuckin’ magician?’ Miss Aldridge looked up sternly, after an aggrieved glance at the chalk-impregnated tatters of her academic gown, a garment she always wore in deference to the pretentious stuffiness of the Wednesday afternoon ‘special’ assemblies when the marks were read out.
‘I must ask you to leave at once!’ she said. ‘I must protest most strongly at your language. There are young ladies present!’ The black man glanced round pacifically at the rows of Third Formers in grey knee socks.
‘Dem pretty scraggy bunch,’ he said, but he said it more with pity than contempt. ‘Don’ arse me to marry none o’ dese womans. No sir!’ Then he left, just as he had come, through the window. Stoned blacks, Alice reflected, were a most uncommon thing in Surrey.
‘Street theatre,’ Jem said to her brightly in the brief hubbub which followed. ‘He’s probably an unemployed member of the actors’ union.’ Alice had never heard the term ‘street theatre’ before. She wondered how Jem could be so knowledgeable. ‘I hope he’s getting an Arts Council grant,’ Jem said. ‘He has brought life to dead literature.’
To be sure, there was something profoundly dead about all the literature considered suitable for distribution during the Silent Reading Hour. Miss Aldridge kept it locked up in the form-room cupboard, a greyish pile of old hardbacks which had all the appearance of having been got in a job lot from the deceased estate of some war-time schoolmarm. These she distributed, with a punitive delight, once a week at the appointed hour. Fiction was hardly represented at all in the collection and, such as it was, it was pocky and dusty enough to render even the likes of Wilkie Collins stone dead to the girls for ever. There were, of course, the worthy biographies. Other than the Oliver Cromwell, which was currently in Jem’s possession, there were those of Albert Schweitzer, and of ‘Little Wolferl’ of Salzburg and of the great Dr Arnold of Rugby. There was a book called Great World Leaders, which ran through the whole yellowing ragbag from the Aga Khan and Chiang Kai-shek, to the Emperor of Ethiopia and Queen Wilhemina of the Netherlands. The only qualification for inclusion, Alice considered, was that you had to have been dead for at least ten years. Any World Leader still breathing in 1980 was automatically rendered ineligible.
As Alice watched the stoned black man make his way across the grass towards the gate, she noticed that two butterflies were hovering over the bu
ddleia. It lifted her spirits to see them. It was like dancing inside her head just to have them there and to have Jem in the seat beside her. It was all so delightful and so thoroughly unscheduled. Jem’s coming. And it had all happened so quickly. In the blinking of an eye. Everything had changed. Alice knew at once, on that very first day, that she loved Jem and esteemed her above all others. And that, because of Jem, her whole life – even the Silent Reading Hour – would never be boring again. In a first act of exuberance, she wrote Jem a note and passed it over.
‘Dear Jem,’ said the note. ‘Are you staying for Prep?’
Chapter 2
Jem, it turned out, was a boarder. She had no choice but to stay for Prep. Alice had seldom stayed. There were all sorts of things against doing so. There was the intolerable prolonging of the school day after the dismissal bell had gone, and the way in which one was required to line up at teatime amid the jostling, bumping throng for tin plates of bread and margarine. Alice found it distasteful the way that school could seem so much like the army. There was no value for oneself at such times. Only for the great, heaving, sensible corporate mass. School bread reverted to raw dough balls in the mouth. Upon contact with one’s saliva, it seemed somehow to unbake itself. Lenora Gripe said that you could roll it into gummy lumps in the palm of your hand and use it to bait fish hooks. At any rate that was what her brothers did. She collected up what was left each day and took it home for their convenience.
Alice’s friend Flora Fergusson had always stayed for Prep, right from their days in the junior school. But then Flora’s parents had insisted on it. It saved them on food bills if Flora got her ‘tea’ at school, and Flora, being half starved at home through their stinginess, was inured to the spitball bread. Certainly, Alice had never stayed merely for the sake of Flora’s companionship as she found herself now doing for Jem’s. It was for Jem, and Jem alone, that she joyfully confronted the margarine and doughball bread, wishing to prolong the day’s contact.
Jem spent the hour copying up Alice’s Biology notes under the heading ‘Flatworms, Nematode Worms and Liver Flukes’. She did this, Alice observed, in a curious, obsolete, ornately looped copperplate for which she employed a fountain pen containing brown ink.
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